


Drown In Neon & Smoke

by untune_the_sky



Series: Soulmate AU [5]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Bucky Barnes Returns, Bucky's Working Through Some Stuff, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, F/M, M/M, Platonic Soulmates, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Protective Bucky Barnes, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmarks, Soulmate AU AU, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 15:31:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6860830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/untune_the_sky/pseuds/untune_the_sky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><div class="center">
  <p>"I guess something much bigger than life is holding you down.<br/>I bet now that you're older, you're lying.<br/>He was the last thing you saw when the sedative hit,<br/>for the last time, you just couldn't deal with it."</p>
  <p>"<i>Tanner Boyle vs. the 7th Grade</i>" — AM Taxi</p>
</div>
            </blockquote>





	Drown In Neon & Smoke

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU of the Soulmate AU! It uses the same soulmark system as the Soulmark AU, but the pairings shifted around. It isn't Soulmate AU canon. I started it by accident while I was still writing Walking Through Windows. It was supposed to tie _into_ WTW, but then Clint ran away with it and changed up his soulmark and Bucky decided to hop on _that_ real quick, which. *hands* So I'm posting this here with the caveat that I will probably come back to it, but it's nowhere near finished at the moment. :) 
> 
> You do _not_ need to read the Soulmate AU to read this.
> 
> Thanks to Michael for giving it a once over for me. Any and all mistakes are my own (except for formatting.)

Clint has legitimately never considered himself to be even remotely well adjusted. He’s done okay, considering where he started, but compare him to anybody else, and he’s a mess. He'll happily admit that to anybody who asks. In fact, there’s not a whole hell of a lot that Clinton Francis Barton won’t admit to if he’s talking to the right person. He tries to be honest with himself, though, even when he can’t be honest with everybody else, because lying to himself just leads to all kinds of bad places.

So in the interest of being honest, he stands in front of the mirror in the upstairs bedroom that he used to share with his brother, wishing he was anywhere but his dead parents’ defunct farm, and says, “Well. Ain’t that a kick in the head?” He’s shirtless and he’s got the worst case of bedhead he’s ever seen, even on himself, but that’s not what has him considering his shoulder with something akin to resignation on his face.

He got the call about Project: Insight from Nat at three in morning and hasn’t gone back to sleep since. He’s been too busy calling in favors so that once she’s used up all of her favors, she’s not left completely high and dry. Clint doesn’t have as many favors to call in. His network isn’t as widespread as hers and it’s composed of people in entirely different parts of the world, but that’s okay. Different parts of the world is where she’s gonna need to be once everything’s settled to her liking.

He hasn’t really been paying attention to anything but phone calls and various reports coming through the radio on NPR. He doesn’t even have a TV out here. He’s got electricity for the bare necessities, but he’s been on an extended leave of absence from SHIELD since he kind of lost his shit at the tail end of a mission in February of 2013. His psych evals have all come back pretty good, but stick him somewhere chilly, flash some blue lights at him, and he just — well, it’s not pretty.

It’s not pretty for anybody.

Too bad they hadn’t figured that out before sending him to Chicago on what was supposed to be a milk run. It had been a milk run, too; the whole thing so easy he was almost bored. He’d finished things up, wiped down his nest, and called the local law enforcement to come handle the cleanup. The local LEOs had shown up, blue lights flashing, and two of them were dead before his handler realized what was going on. Sitwell tranq’d him and blamed the deaths on — something. Clint has never been cleared to know all the details.

He’s not cleared to know any of the details about what was going down in DC, either. But looking at his soulmark, he thinks maybe he ought to investigate getting the clearance.

Clint turns to check his back. It looks the same as the front, basically — the same as always, but that’s not the important part. See, the thing about Clint’s soulmark is that he’s always known — everyone’s always known — that his soulmate was probably going to be… well, not violent, but at least dangerous. Or that they’d live dangerously, maybe. Something like that. Because Clint was born with a bullet on his right shoulder, clear as day. Also clear as day? The bullet was hitting something. At the time, nobody could figure out what. Pair that up with the fact that nobody had ever been able to give him any information about what kind of slug it was, and well.

He’s gone through life figuring it was inevitable that he’d meet someone cagey or shady and that they’d match up. He’s accepted it. He sort of thought when he first met Natasha that she might be ‘the one.’ But the morning after he talked her into defecting, he found a small red hourglass behind his left ear. She had a small, purple arrowhead in the same spot, so while they were soulmates, it was all platonic. And that’s fine. He likes knowing there’s somebody out there who’ll have his back when he needs them to have it.

Looks like things’ll be going the other way for a little while, though. And that’s fine, too. Clint might be a walking disaster, but he’s a dependable one when it counts.

Sighing, he trails his fingertips along the snowflakes that swirl over the skin on his shoulder and down his front. When he was sixteen, the thing the bullet was hitting came in a bit more clearly. Clint’s pretty sure it’s ice, if only because all the snowflakes seem to be moving away from it, like they’ve been chipped off, maybe. But Bobbi says she thinks it’s glass. She got poetic about it once, before she met Hunter and got her life sort of figured out — said it was like a window keeping out a storm. She’d looked unimpressed when Clint reminded her that the bullet would shatter the glass and let the storm in anyway.

Either way, whatever the bullet’s hitting, the snowflakes cover him from his shoulder down to the dip of his spine on one side and the taper of his obliques on the other. They actually go down farther than that, a few of them hiding on his hip, the crease where it meets his thigh.

That’s all well and good.

He’s covered in snowflakes. When he’s feeling a little sentimental, he thinks the blue-black, mostly-white of them is actually kind of pretty. There’s no pattern that he can figure out; they’re not geometrically arranged or anything. But that’s also not the important part of this whole examination.

No, Clint started checking his soulmark over for general changes because the bullet — the part of his soulmark that he’s had since he first started squalling in the delivery room in 1982 — has changed. That one thing is big enough to warrant his reaction, but he wants to make sure nothing else is different before he makes the phone call he knows he’s going to have to make.

Upon finding no other major differences, just the addition of quite a few more snowflakes near the small of his back, Clint sighs again and picks up his phone. The light’s fading outside, sunset tingeing the walls of his room orange-red, and he knows Nat’s gonna be tired, but this is important. So he leans one hip against his dresser and dials her latest burner.

“Hey,” she says when she picks up. “What’ve you got for me?”

“Some stuff in Egypt, but that’s not why I’m calling,” Clint says.

He knows she can tell something’s up because she doesn’t reply immediately. He hears nothing for a long moment, then the faint click of a door closing on her end of the line before she says, “What is it?”

“You know how you’re helping Steve go after the Winter Soldier?”

“Yes,” she says, because obviously.

“I need you to not kill him.” Lucky chooses that moment to trot into the bedroom. He huffs gently and hops up onto his spot at the foot of the bed, staring at Clint out of his one good eye.

“Steve wouldn’t let me, anyway.”

“Right.” Clint kind of forgot about the whole ‘World War II hero who went MIA right before Cap was supposedly KIA’ thing. “Sorry,” he says, rubbing tiredly at his forehead.

“Why’re you asking me not to kill him?”

Clint laughs humorlessly. “You know how I’ve got that bullet on my shoulder?” She doesn’t answer — of course she knows about the bullet. “Got a little red star on it now. And you gotta admit, the snowflakes make a lot more sense, considering. Not to mention the ice.”

“Clint…”

Shaking his head, he says, “He’s my soulmate, Nat. The fucking Winter Soldier is my goddamn soulmate.” Silence rings down the line as Clint flops back on his bed, burying his fingers in the fur on Lucky’s back. “I’m fucked.” Again, all he hears is silence. Then he listens to her inhale slowly. She’s gonna say something. It’ll be smart. It’ll be smart and right and canny, and Clint will want to do whatever it is she suggests. So obviously, he interrupts her. “Figured I’d head down to DC.”

“Steve and Sam are already chasing leads here.”

“Maybe I’ll head home, then,” he says.

Nat sighs and Clint can picture the expression on her face. She doesn’t tell him not to do anything stupid, though. At this point, she has to realize it’d be useless. “Water my lemon tree for me, okay?”

“Sure,” Clint says, quirking a smile. He’s the reason she has a lemon tree that’s probably half dead by now.

“And… you might not be as fucked as you think you are,” she says.

Staring up at his ceiling, the light in the room dying as the sun continues to set outside, he says, “You think?”

“He’s…” Natasha pauses. He imagines the way her lips are probably quirking to the side — her rueful little smirk. “I don’t know. He’s not what I expected. And… well. At least he’s not actually Hydra.”

“All those rumors panned out?” Clint asks, scratching behind Lucky’s ear.

“According to SHIELD’s records, he’s been independent since ’98.”

“Huh. Hard to believe that’s a coincidence,” Clint says.

“That’s when it changed the first time?”

“That’s when it started looking like the bullet was hitting ice, not just an invisible wall. It didn’t change before then, but it’s been changing pretty regularly ever since. Still always snowflakes, though,” Clint murmurs. “I’ve had them for forever — even before I guessed about the ice.”

Natasha hums softly. “You should count them,” she says. “The snowflakes.”

“There were a hundred and eighty-six, as of a few minutes ago,” Clint says. “Which is sixteen more than there were yesterday.”

She laughs softly. “Thorough. Give me some details?”

Holding the phone between his ear and his shoulder, Clint rubs at his eyes with his free hand, the other still rubbing behind Lucky’s ears. “There were thirty-three snowflakes in addition to the bullet when I was born.”

“Okay, and you’re sure it didn’t change prior to ’98?”

“Pretty sure, but I’d have to check the records,” Clint says, frowning a little. “In ’98, when the ice showed up, I still had… a grand total of thirty-three snowflakes. The next day I had sixty-eight.”

“Hm… do you remember how fast the new snowflakes showed up after that?”

“I don’t remember dates, but — the records would have them. It was always… either just one or several all at once. And a couple times, like that first day, a lot all at once.”

There’s another pause, and he can hear her open the door. Voices rise and fall in a steady murmur in the background. Clint thinks he recognizes Steve’s. He doesn’t know the other voice, so it’s probably Sam, who he’s never met, but likes in theory and on principle. “Ask Tony to check all of the SHIELD data dump and flag the assassinations or suspicious deaths so we can run comparisons against visuals I'll pull up myself,” Natasha says, mouth obviously held away from the phone. “Back to ’44. I think we’re looking for thirty-three kills until 1998. After that, I’m not entirely sure, but I will be soon.”

“Aw, Nat, no,” Clint says. He doesn’t want the snowflakes all over him to represent deaths. He’s got enough of those on his own conscience. He doesn’t want to be a visible reminder to his soulmate of every life they’ve ever taken.

“What’s your source?” Steve rumbles in the background.

Clint knows Nat’s wearing her smug kitten expression, the one that lets everyone know that she knows something they don’t know. He loves that look — when it’s directed at someone not him. And, he discovers in that moment, when it’s not a secret about him that she should probably tell everyone else about, anyway. Steve’s seen his soulmark. He’ll figure it out with the smallest of hints.

“His soulmate,” Nat says.

“Buck doesn’t have a romantic soulmate,” Steve says.

Sighing, Clint says, “Go ahead and put me on speaker, I guess.”

“You sure?” He knows she’ll hang up, break the SIM card in her burner before letting either Steve or Sam know he’s her source if he says ‘no.’

He doesn’t say ‘no.’

“Yeah, sure. Gonna have to tell him eventually, anyway,” Clint mutters.

“You’re on,” she says after a short pause, her voice echoing oddly.

“Steve,” he says. “Person I’m assuming is Sam.”

“Hey man,” says the unfamiliar voice, thus confirming that it does, in fact, belong to Sam.

“Clint,” Steve says, and he’s surprised. That’s mildly gratifying, for some reason. “What do you know about Buck’s soulmate? And his kill count?”

The breath Clint takes is silent. He holds it, letting himself keep this secret for just a moment more, before he says, “Well, Cap. I know the bullet on my shoulder just got a little red star on it. And I got a hundred and eighty-six snowflakes on me, which is sixteen more than I had yesterday. Started out with thirty-three of ’em when I was born, so. Educated guess.”

“Ho- _ly_ shit,” Sam says. Clint appreciates the sentiment.

Steve says. “Are you sure it’s him? Cause I know Buck didn’t have a romantic soulmate.”

“He wouldn’t have, back when you knew him,” Natasha points out. “Clint wasn’t born until ’82.”

“Right,” Steve says. Does his voice sound weird? Clint can’t tell. It occurs to him, in that moment, to wonder how Captain America, 1940’s icon and war hero, feels about his BFF having a male romantic soulmate. “So you’re coming to DC, Clint?”

“Nah,” Clint says, keeping his tone as laid back as possible. “Figured I’d take Lucky and head up to New York. Nat says you and Sam have DC and the surrounding areas covered.”

“Okay,” Steve says, and Clint can’t tell what’s going through Cap’s head. He wishes he were there so he could see Steve’s reaction first-hand. “Just — you’re pretty much the only person I’m sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, he won’t kill.”

“Pretty sure, even if the list of people he won’t kill is short, you’re on it,” Clint points out. He did get the rundown of events in DC from Nat, after all. He’s just not sure how to take Steve’s apparently wholehearted belief that Clint will be safe with — or from — the Winter Soldier.

“Yeah, it’s the rest of us who have to worry,” Sam says, tone dry.

“I don’t know,” Natasha says, voice curious. “He shot me in the shoulder.”

“And the stomach, that one time,” Clint points out.

“Right,” she says.

“So I mean, nonfatal shots. Twice,” Clint says.

“Could just be that I wasn’t his target either time.”

“Could be,” Clint agrees. “Either way.” Sam and Steve have started discussing the search patterns they’re going to use and the potential for having to take the whole operation international. He hears a few clicks, like someone’s picking up the phone, and then the tinny quality of being on speaker disappears. “You coming up?” He asks.

“I could be convinced,” Natasha says.

“Be nice to have you around,” he offers.

“Be nice to be around, I guess,” she says, and he knows she’s smiling a little.

“See you in a couple days?”

“Sure,” she says, and then the line goes dead. Lucky gives a muffled woof and pushes himself forward a little so that when he lays his head down, it’s on Clint’s stomach.

“So this is gonna be interesting,” Clint murmurs. “Hm…” Looking down at his dog, he catches Lucky’s eye and says, “He might sound Russian. I dunno. But don’t hate him because of that, okay?”

Lucky just huffs a breath against Clint’s belly, tongue lolling out as Clint scratches behind his ears again. “Awesome, glad we’re on the same page,” he says, like Lucky actually answered him. Because who else is gonna answer him all the way out here in the middle of nowhere, Iowa?

 

* * *

 

The few people who know his face call him Ivan.

He does not know the name he was born with, if he was born with a name.

Rather, he supposes he did not know it before the man on the bridge called him Bucky. His first memory is of pain — excruciating pain. The headache he has now is no match for the memory of what he went through before he escaped from Hydra. Even though the edges are faded and tattered, even though it has been almost two decades since he last sat in one of those damn chairs, he remembers the pain.

There are other memories as well, other feelings that he had not, at the time, had a name for. Fear. Anger. Frustration. Confusion. All the obvious choices. But the pain was what he lived with daily.

He woke to it when they took him out of cryostasis —

It thrummed through his bloodstream as he thawed —

It stretched through his muscles as they briefed him before every mission —

It beat at his bones with merciless violence as he lay in wait —

It spiked through his mind as he pulled the trigger —

It crystallized over his eyes in fractal patterns, the golden ratio, as they froze him again.

It left him inexplicably when he woke in 1998. He remembers the sounds first, the voices arguing over him as though he was not sentient. The memories he has, the few that he collected and hoarded during the long years of his service between his missions, are full of people disregarding him.

He thinks, now, that it was arrogance so far above and beyond what they should have felt that allowed him to make his escape. Such arrogance.

The voices argued, though, because something was different. Something about this thaw was markedly different from all those he had previously experienced. He could tell, even before his eyes could see or his vocal chords vibrate. There was a warmth he was unaccustomed to radiating through him. It was a small thing, almost like waves — but not quite. He did not have the words to adequately or accurately describe it. So instead, he focused on the voices.

“You have the photographs?”

“Yes — look. You can clearly see — ”

“You’re _sure_ these are of the asset?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“You’re right. The mark’s new.”

“I know.”

“Shit.”

“I know. Are you telling Pierce, or am I?”

The voices began to fade, muffled slightly by the rhythmic tapping of footsteps moving away from him.

“Neither. We’re waiting until our relief gets here, handing it off, and then calling in sick tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

The voices faded completely, cut off by the sound of a closing door, but some of the words they had spoken lodged in his mind.

_The mark’s new._

The mark.

Shivering on the table, his body working as quickly as it could to repair the damage caused to his cells by the ice crystals that the handlers could never prevent, he considered that.

What mark?

Why was it important?

He knew that it was important.

Marks — marks.

Marks were very important.

He had never had a mark. Rather, he did not think he had ever had one. None of his scraps of memory showed him anything that might be a mark, at least.

The warmth suffused him, though. It was different. He finally managed to follow the wave-like motion of it to its point of origin — his shoulder. His right shoulder. It was not hot. In fact, when he managed to press his cheek to it, it was as cold as the rest of him. But under his skin, inside and far away from anything that his handlers could ever touch, warmth spread.

He liked it.

All his previous thoughts left him at that realization.

He liked this feeling, this warmth. He could not name it, could not quantify it — every analytical part of his mind rebelled against it, but he did not care. He liked it.

Hours passed, his body slowly warming to room temperature, then beyond. He stopped shivering, but the feeling in his chest remained. Not content, necessarily, but — something.

Something new.

Something important.

Voices returned. Not the ones from before. Unfamiliar voices belonging to unfamiliar men.

“They’re sure?”

“As sure as they can be.”

“All the biometrics have changed?”

“Yeah, all of them. And its brainwaves are off the fucking charts.”

“Okay. So our best option is what Pierce suggested.”

“Just cut it off?”

“Cut it off.”

“That might not change anything. You know they sometimes — they just _move_.”

“Or change to accommodate the damage — I know. But we have no other choice.”

“We’ve got the original schematics? For the arm?”

“Yeah. Assuming its biometrics return to baseline, we’ll just make it a new right one.”

“Probably make it even better — more access to vibranium now than they had back then.”

He tuned them out at that, prying his eyes open. His left arm was, of course, the same as it had always been. Metal. Functional. His right arm was… also the same as it had always been. Flesh and blood. Also functional. Sliding his eyes to the side, he looked at his right shoulder and realized — some small part of him finally understood what the handlers were talking about.

There was an arrow, its head resting on the curve of his shoulder pointing up. Balanced on the tip was a bird, but the color was solid black, so he could not see any true details. The length of the arrow lay along the outside of his upper arm, ending with its fletching just before the bend of his elbow. The fletching and the shaft were black, their lines clean. The arrowhead was iridescent — metallic. When he shifted the smallest bit, he thought it shone faintly purple. The light above him was fluorescent, though, and thus it was difficult to be sure.

They were going to remove his right arm.

They were going to remove the mark.

His mark.

The handlers paused beside the table upon which he lay — careless. He moved without conscious thought. The man nearest him went down with a snapped neck courtesy of his left hand, and the one next to him suffered a crushed trachea. He would die — eventually.

Divesting both men of their weapons, it took him almost no time to locate the armory. He was always woken close to it. Expedient. It was easier to thaw him, outfit him, and brief him all on the same level.

It was a simple thing, then, to make it out of the base. All he had to do was set charges in the appropriate locations and shoot everyone in the throat if he could not kill them outright. It kept them from utilizing any and all phrases that might activate latent programming or kill-switches. And then he could dispose of them at his leisure — if they had not bled to death already.

The base exploded behind him as he walked away, mask in place. He discarded it after the first woman screamed. He did not know where he was, but he had to find out quickly and plan accordingly. His handlers had given him all the skills he would need to survive in an unfamiliar country. He was in the United States. Something told him it was not as unfamiliar as it should be.

It took him months to learn how to operate within civilian populations without drawing attention to himself, but eventually he hit the mark. Small things seemed to work best. Cover the arm with a long sleeved shirt — the hand with a glove — regardless of the time of year. Stay in cooler climates to make the glove less suspect. Smile without showing too many teeth. Keep all weapons hidden from view at all times.

He remembers that time now, and realizes again just how steep his learning curve had been. Rural Kansas is not the best place to learn how to be a person after being nothing but a weapon for decades. He had succeeded, though, because failure meant a return to those who would take his arm, his mark, and the few pieces of his identity that had surfaced as he maneuvered through this new place and time.

He thinks of the man on the bridge.

He thinks of the men who masqueraded as a new organization, who thought he would not recognize the names, the faces, the voices of his previous handlers. He took the job when Commander Rumlow left the message on his business voicemail. After the bridge, while debriefing, he finally met the mysterious ‘Pierce,’ the man whose anger the younger members of the organization had feared in 1998.

Secretary of Defense Alexander Pierce had presence.

Pierce attempted to use that presence — and a particular phrase — to reassert control over him after he failed to complete an operation of utmost importance to Pierce's organization. It did not go well for Pierce. That bank vault is full of six day old, rotted corpses. He wonders how long it will take the authorities to discover that their precious Secretary of Defense died in a pool of his own piss — Hydra credentials on full display.

The thought makes him smile.

He wonders if his soulmate would find that smile unnerving.

The waitress in the diner where he is eating breakfast seems to like it, his smile.

He can see the edge of her soulmark where it rises just a little higher on her collarbone than her uniform can cover. Flowers. They look nice enough, he supposes. She probably loves them. He knows he likes his own soulmark, is curious as to what mark his own soul put on his soulmate’s skin. He wants to know what the arrow and the cast of hawks on his arm mean — what they represent. Each one appeared, either singly or in small groups, over the past fourteen years. The single bird perched on the arrowhead remained, but the others flew along his collarbone and down his shoulder blade.

He guesses it could be a cast of falcons. He could be wrong about the species of bird all together. Maybe it is an unkindness or a murder, a convocation or a siege.

It is entirely possible he has developed something of an obsession when it comes to the different names for groupings of birds.

Whatever mark his soulmate bears, he does not doubt they are well suited for one another, at least. Soulmates have to be — what would be the point of the marks, otherwise?

Finishing off his hash browns, he leaves a folded twenty under his empty cup of coffee and heads for the door.

DC was a mess.

DC left him a mess.

But probably not as much of a mess as he would have been had he met the man on the bridge — Captain Steven Grant Rogers — when he knew nothing about himself. Not that he knew anything about Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes when they met, of course. But he knows he prefers his coffee dark and sweet, his pancakes thin, his bacon crispy, and his potatoes any way he can get them. He knows he prefers long-range kills to those that are up close and personal. He knows he would take having to wear gloves during the height of summer in Raleigh over wearing them because of freezing temperatures in Montreal any day.

He knows himself as he is now — his likes and dislikes, his strengths and weaknesses. He knows who he can work with and who he will kill on sight if he ever sees them again.

He is a whisper. He is a phantom. He is a legend.

He takes the jobs he wants to take.

No one forces his hand — no one.

He wonders if he will ever be comfortable enough with the idea of Sgt. J. B. Barnes to allow someone to call him James. Or Barnes. He wonders if he will ever be comfortable with Rogers calling him Bucky.

He does not mind the impulse that made him pull Rogers out of the Potomac. His original ‘mission’ stated that he should stop Rogers’ attempt to recalibrate the helicarriers at all costs. Obviously, that is not what he did. He stood on the banks below as the helicarriers rose from their hidden hangars, and he watched the fights as they took place.

He watched Rogers fall.

He thought it was very biblical, the way the man fell so perfectly — arms spread wide and Christ-like. He knows Rogers has twice avoided certain death — three times or more, actually, if you believe the exhibit in the museum that touted Rogers’ strength and perseverance in the face of adversity during the early years of his life.

Rogers does seem like a hard-headed man, he will give him that.

Walking to his car, he hums to himself, a slightly off-key rendition of the chorus to “It’s Been A Long, Long Time.” And that makes a little more sense, how he has always liked the big band songs — Sinatra and Miller, Dorsey and Crosby. He will take one of them over modern, popular music without question, though he admits to a certain fondness for Jay-Z. He wonders if that is because the man is from Brooklyn, and some silent shard of his original self wanted to go home.

Oddly, now he does not consider any single place home. He has safe houses all over the world, but no particular residence that he wants to go back to when he is tired or hungry or injured. Any place will do, so long as it keeps him off the radar long enough to sleep and eat and heal. But he has never had a safe house in Brooklyn. Or New York State, come to think of it.

Strange, that.

New York City is his current destination.

Keys in the ignition, he starts the car and laughs a little when Billie Holiday’s voice comes through the speakers and croons, “Them that’s got shall have, them that’s not shall lose…”

The lyrics ring true in his mind. Fitting, in a way.

He pulls out of the diner’s parking lot, making his way to I-95 without any real trouble. The drive takes less than five hours. He speeds a little, because going precisely the speed limit would probably call attention to him more than going five over.

He drives through Brooklyn once he reaches it, wondering if anything will seem familiar to him. Nothing does. He arrives in Bedford-Stuyvesant without incident and finds parking that he is relatively certain will not be ticketed or towed. Then he exits his car, leaning back against the hood with his hands tucked into his pockets as he takes a breath of New York air. He gets a whiff of garbage, someone grilling meat, stale urine, and baking bread. It does not cause a cascade of memories to fall into his mind.

His attention is caught, however, by several men in tracksuits bickering in Russian in front of the building that he intends to enter — to investigate.

It was not difficult, after all, to follow the trail of information from Captain Steven Grant Rogers to the mysterious group of people that comprised his team when he fought the alien invasion in 2012. A doctor — a monster. A billionaire — an adrenaline junkie with a new-grown conscience. A redheaded woman — a familiar spy. An archer — a question mark, an anomaly, a shadow.

He, himself, was out of the country when the portal opened over Stark's tower. The question mark is what caught his attention so many years after the fact — and the absurd interest in Paleolithic weaponry. The second would have held his interest regardless of the question mark.

He admits that freely.

So of course, the Russians’ discussion of the best way to ambush and kill the archer catches and holds his attention as few other things might have. Perhaps they are unaccustomed to others in the neighborhood speaking Russian — that would explain the inexplicable way they seem to entirely disregard common sense. It would also explain the inexplicable way they disregard him as he pushes away from his car and walks toward them.

“Добрый день, господа,” he says, a simple greeting. He calls them ‘gentlemen’ as a courtesy only. It is blatantly obvious that no one in the group is any such thing.

They turn startled eyes toward him, and he smiles. It is an easy expression, one that says nothing of the violence that dances beneath his skin, tingles on his fingertips.

“What you want, bro?” The largest one asks, ignoring the fact that he clearly speaks Russian. His accent implies he is from Moscow.

Still speaking Russian, he says, “I overheard your conversation. I think it would be best for you to leave now. This Avenger is under my protection.”

They laugh.

They should know better than to laugh.

Superstition alone should hold their tongues.

Warnings from men like him, once given, are rarely repeated.

One of the middling men pulls his tracksuit jacket to the side, showing off a cheap handgun — as though that is enough to intimidate him.

His smile does not slip one bit as he begins pulling the glove off of his left hand. “I have warned you,” he says, brows rising as the Russian falls from his tongue. The vibranium-adamantium alloy that is his wrist glints in the fading sunlight. One of the men toward the back of the group murmurs something to himself that even his enhanced hearing does not catch.

That man grabs the arm of another, and whisper-hisses at him frantically. The two of them turn without another word and abandon their comrades. The rest of the men in tracksuits array themselves before him. He drops the glove to the pavement and flexes his hand. He wonders if they do not remember the bedtime stories their parents told them of the winter ghoul, or if they do not think he is capable of the things the stories say he is.

There is no one else on the street.

The light bleeds orange-red as the sun sets.

This will be quick.

He cannot leave any of them alive to seek vengeance. The two who left will spread the cautionary tale their friends are about to become. Anyone who follows will show the proper respect.

In the end, the fight is fast — almost bloodless. Not a single bullet is fired.

The cleanup, on the other hand, is not fast at all. He is mildly irritated that he must now dispose of their bodies. He does so regardless, darkness shrouding his movements. This is a complication he did not foresee, but he is usually prepared for these types of eventualities. He strips the corpses after driving out of the city with all of them in his trunk, weighs them down, and drops them into different bodies of water. Then he removes his duffel bag from the backseat, wipes the car down, removes its plates, and sets it on fire. The VIN number has already been covered in acid, then filed away.

It takes him an hour to walk back to an area where he feels it will be safe to call a driver who will ask him no questions. The driver leaves him in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge after confirming that an electronic payment of the appropriate amount has been wired into one of his Swiss bank accounts.

He walks back to Bedford-Stuyvesant, duffel bag slung over one shoulder, hands in his pockets, and wonders if anyone aside from the Russians’ immediate family members will mourn their deaths. He wonders if Clinton Francis Barton, Captain America’s archer — the novel assassin, Hawkeye — will mind. They were planning to assault and kill him; surely Barton will not hold that against him.

He cannot let the archer come to harm before he knows whether or not the man is the source of the arrow on his arm, the birds that spread their dark wings over his skin. There are thirty-nine birds soaring across the dips of muscle and raised scar tissue that make up his chest and back.

Walking up to Barton’s building, he finds the main entrance unlocked. He makes his way upstairs, locating Barton’s apartment without incident. The lock on the door is unsettlingly easy to pick. He leaves no external indications of his presence as he slips inside. Relocking it silently behind himself, he drops his duffel bag, leans back against the door, and inhales slowly.

The air is… stale, as though the place has been empty for a very long time. Perhaps he should have listened to the Russians a bit longer before killing them. They might have provided details concerning the archer’s current whereabouts.

His eyes skim over the parts of the apartment that he can see from his position by the door, and he smiles a little. Beneath the scent of stale air, he can tell that Barton has a dog of some kind. There is a dry and dying potted lemon tree in one corner. The sight lines into the apartment, particularly once he accounts for the positions of the furniture, are nonexistent.

There is a blanket hanging over the back of the couch. It is so alarmingly colored that he can tell it is purple even in the half-dark of the room. The windows have very small curtains, just the short ones at the top. He will have to check in the morning, evaluate the building from a higher vantage to ensure his immediate assessment regarding the sight lines is correct.

Still. It could be worse.

For now, he shrugs out of his jacket, drops it atop his duffel, and walks through the rest of the apartment. Evaluating — always evaluating. It is a part of him that he cannot turn off. He is not sure he would wish to turn it off, even if he could. He values the analytical assessment, appreciates that he can objectively look at this place as a potential safe house without considering the man who owns it.

Returning to the front door, he picks up his duffel bag and moves through to the bedroom. He strips down to his boxers and t-shirt, then sprawls over the coverlet. It is thin and worn in places, obviously old and well-used. Comfortable. He has not allowed himself to keep something like this — attachments to material possessions are pointless when he might have to leave them behind at a moment’s notice.

There are pictures taped to the wall. Enough light comes through the bedroom window from a street lamp outside to show him that the pictures are of people. A younger, dark-haired girl with a bow. The redhead from New York and DC. An older man in a suit who holds himself carefully, even in the frozen frame — that man could be dangerous, he thinks. There is a blonde woman with her arms wrapped around a dark-haired man — they appear to be laughing. Teammates, the Avengers. They are scattered in pictures, groups of two and three. Sometimes, they have obviously just finished a battle. Sometimes, they are simply relaxing.

Off to the side, away from the others, there is a picture of Barton with a man who shares similar features. He is older, more weathered by time and circumstance, but they are undoubtedly related.

Interesting.

For now, he will sleep. In the morning, when he wakes, he will take care of a few things — see about making the apartment more secure — perhaps the building as a whole. Keeping someone from getting to the upstairs door would make reinforcing it less immediately necessary.


End file.
